


Moonlight Confessions

by callistawolf



Series: Porsches and Sunsets: Road Trip Fics [3]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Confessions, F/M, Past Relationship(s), Pillow Talk, Romance, mentions of Laurel Lance - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 18:31:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4575216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callistawolf/pseuds/callistawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While on their road-trip, Felicity has a question for Oliver one night as they lie in bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moonlight Confessions

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure what gave me the idea for this, I think it was a mixture of things. I wrote the prompt down in my notebook and today, came across it and thought, "hey, I want to write that." So I did. And here it is. This takes place on the summer road trip, 4 months in and Oliver and Felicity are *very* happy together. ;)

It was four months into their extended “vacation” from Starling City when Felicity finally asked Oliver a question she’d had in her mind since, well, since that night in his family’s mansion, under the watchful eye of Slade’s cameras.  

They were laying in bed, the moonlight filtering through the open curtains and a breeze blowing across their bare skin.  As with virtually every night since they started this adventure together, they’d fallen into bed and into one another and now they lay, sated and happy and tired.  This was when they talked, when the night was still and the mood was calm. 

“Why not Laurel?” Felicity asked him.  Her head was cushioned at the crook of his arm, her fingers tracing unseen patterns over the heated flesh of his chest, connecting the tip of his Bratva star down to the first Chinese character etched into his flank.  

“What?” Oliver said, sounding a little disoriented. His fingers, which had been swirling a circle into her hip, stilled. 

Suddenly, Felicity felt silly for having brought it up.  But, she’d opened the door and now she may as well walk through it.  

“I’ve always wondered, after how you were those first months I knew you, why you never tried to reconnect with Laurel.”

Oliver was quiet for a long moment.  In fact, Felicity began to worry that he might not answer her.  But then, he started talking, “I slept with her, you know.  Right before the Undertaking went down.  I thought we had stopped Merlyn and that I was free, so I went to her apartment and… I slept with her.”

A rock settled in Felicity’s heart, a heart she wasn’t terribly proud of.  It felt an awful lot like jealousy.  She’d known things with them at that time had been… loaded.  But Felicity had studiously avoided thinking of what all had gone down there before _everything_ went down.  She swallowed.  

“So why didn’t you stay with her after that?  Or after you returned from Lian Yu the second time?”

Oliver wrapped his arm around her, pulling her closer to his side as he sighed.  “Because I slept with her for all the wrong reasons, Felicity.”

“What do you mean?  You were in love with her.  You carried her picture with you the first years you were away.”  She remembered hearing him tell Dig that, thinking that it was romantic despite the pang it’d given her heart at the time.  Back when her feelings had still mostly been just a crush.

Oliver made a noise.  “I wasn’t,” he said quietly.  So quietly that she wasn’t quite sure she’d heard him.  Felicity lifted her head and turned to look at him.  His clear blue eyes were pensive as he studied her.  

“What?”

“I wasn’t.  In love with Laurel.  I was… caught up in what she represented to me.”

Felicity frowned a little.  “How do you mean?”

“Well, before the island, things with Laurel were pretty easy.  She was beautiful and smart.  She was what my mother called “the right choice”.  But even then, it was all about who I was supposed to become and I couldn’t stand all that pressure.  My dad wanted me to have an ivy league education and take over the business.  My mom wanted me to settle down, get married and start acting like a proper Queen.  The thing is, the more I felt those pressures the more I would act out.”

“Partying, right?  I heard about the peeing on the cop car…”

He chuckled.  “Yes, and cheating.  I cheated on Laurel constantly.  There was ten different other girls that she knew about.  There were about ten more besides that.”

Felicity gaped at him and Oliver cringed a little. 

“I know.  I know!  But she kept taking me back.  So it was easy.  But then she started pushing the pressure on me, wanting us to move in together.  I knew she loved me, wanted to spend her life with me and I loved the idea of that but… the reality scared the shit out of me. So I took Sara with me on the Queen’s Gambit.”

“Ah yes, I remember this part.”

“When I was on the island, that first year, all I did was regret everything that brought me to that place.  That’s when I had that picture of Laurel in my hand almost every day.  If I’d just been man enough either accept the reality of moving in with Laurel or breaking it off with her once and for all, I wouldn’t have been on that island at all.  Her picture, her memory, represented my strongest regret.”

She blinked.  “Wow.  That doesn’t sound terribly romantic.”

Oliver’s chuckle sounded a little rusty. “No, it wasn’t.  But I thought at the time that if I could just get back to Starling and make it up to her, then it would all be okay again.”

Felicity thought for a moment, her teeth biting into her lower lip.  “You once said to me, on that date we went on, that you chose to come home. If you could have chosen to come home earlier, why didn’t you?”

“Because after three years away, I’d already become someone other than the boy who’d left his life behind in Starling City. I’d murdered people, tortured… I didn’t want to touch my friends and family with the truth of what I’d become.”

“And Laurel?” she prompted. 

“Remember when I told you I’d been home, seen Thea and killed her drug dealer?”

Felicity nodded. She would never forget that conversation they’d had on the jet to Nanda Parbat, how Oliver had opened up to her, the defeat in his eyes at thinking he’d failed his little sister whom he’d only ever wanted to protect. 

“While I was at that party, doing _that_ … I saw Laurel and Tommy together.  And I didn’t feel… anything.  No jealousy, no remorse or anything like that.  I wondered if maybe I wasn’t in love with Laurel.  Which later made me wonder if I’d ever really loved her at all.  After all, would I have cheated on her with at least twenty women if I was in love with her?  Would I have even _wanted_ to?”

Felicity watched him closely and again, he squeezed her closer to him.  

“I can’t imagine cheating on you.  All last year, while we weren’t even together but I was in love with you, I couldn’t even think about seeing someone else.  I truly _felt_ what that was like and how that was the love that I always thought I’d had for Laurel.  There was attraction, there was a kind of love, but nothing like what I feel for you.  Nothing _permanent_.”

“Oh.”  What else could she say to that? “But what about that first year you were back?  You have to admit you were rather fixated on Laurel for a while there.”

“I don’t know if you recall, but I wasn’t the most stable of guys when I first came back.  Returning home was a lot more startling than I’d expected it to be.  I came back with this clear mission in mind but when I got there, I had my family to deal with, Tommy, Laurel… I saw, up close and personal, just how bitter and angry Laurel was towards me for what happened with Sara.”

“Rightly so.”

Oliver nodded.  “I think a part of me wanted to make it up to her. I wanted to redeem myself in her eyes. I wanted her forgiveness. Then, later, I wanted to turn back the clock.  Laurel became a sign of the life I left behind and was staring to want back.  If I could make things right with her, if I could get back to where we’d been before I took Sara on the Gambit, then maybe I wasn’t a monster after all.”

“Oh, Oliver.”  Felicity lifted a hand and palmed his cheek.  

“I told you, I was messed up,” he reminded her.  “When I slept with her, that was me making another mistake to try to make up for the hundreds of mistakes I’d already made with her.  I thought Laurel represented a future for me, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t.  I wasn’t in love with her, she was in love with Tommy and Tommy was in love with her. 

“You realize that’s a pretty messed up triangle, right?” 

Oliver chuckled again.  “I know.  When Tommy died, it really threw me back and made me really realize what I’d done to two of the most important relationships in my life.  Staring up with Laurel after that, even after she was done grieving for Tommy, made no sense for me or for her.  Then Sara came back to town and, well…”

“Yeah, I wondered about that at the time.”

Oliver stroked a finger along her cheek.  “You know that getting together with Sara was more about me avoiding the feelings I had for you than anything to do with Laurel, right?” 

“No, I had no idea why you and Sara got together, other than you were both two hot, willing people.”

“I was very close to giving in with you,” he admitted.  “And what I’d told you after Russia was still very much how I felt. I didn’t think that I could ever have that with you.  But working with you, growing closer, was frustrating the hell out of me.”

“You’re not the only one, bub,” she said, jabbing him in the side with her finger. 

“Along came Sara, who already knew a part of me that most people didn’t, who could take care of herself, who was even already in love with someone else so there weren’t really any strings attached.  It was easy… at a time in my life where _nothing_ was easy.”

“I’m glad you had her.  That you had each other,” Felicity murmured, tracing a finger down his jawline and around his bottom lip.  

“I’m sorry if that hurt you.”

“It didn’t.  Not really.  For what it’s worth, I believed you at the time and agreed with you. I didn’t think anything with us was remotely possible.  That whole scene in the mansion threw me for a loop… until I realized it was fake.”

“It was never fake, Felicity.”

The calm way he said that made her heart flutter in her chest.  After four solid months together, you’d think she’d be over the butterflies.  But Oliver always surprised her.  

“I love you.” She told him probably five times a day.  To be fair, he told her ten times.  But after everything they’d been through, she never wanted her feelings for him to be something he doubted. 

Pushing up, she pressed her lips to his.  She meant for it to be a chaste contact, but Oliver reached around and held the back of her head, holding her to him as he moved his lips against hers, tasting her.  Felicity could feel her body responding, the heat traveling through her before settling heavily in her core… 

Oliver pulled back and smirked a little when he caught her pout.  “Did that answer your question?” he asked her. 

She had to push through the fog of arousal before she even remembered what he was talking about.  “Uh… oh!  Yes, I think it did.  You didn’t have to answer that but… thank you.”

He smiled and rubbed his nose alongside hers.  “You’re welcome.”  He kissed the tip of her nose lightly. “I was glad for the opportunity to make sure you understood that what I feel for you is not just the real thing but it’s the first time I’ve ever really felt the real thing.”

Felicity almost could have purred, stretching out over his body, feeling with her leg as she shifted just how interested he was becoming as well.  “You’re such a sap, Oliver Queen.”

“Only for you, Felicity Smoak,” he murmured as he leaned up to kiss her once more.  Then again.  And again.  Until they were both crying out their satisfaction into the moonlit room. 


End file.
